A study published in the journal Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference on June 12 found that chatting with an AI-generated version of a deceased loved one can offer comfort for some mourners. A University of Colorado Boulder team worked with 16 grieving volunteers, each of whom interacted with a text-based AI version of the person they had lost during roughly 20-minute Zoom chats. Participants messaged two systems: a first-person "reincarnation" bot and a third-person "representation" bot. Responses were "largely positive," with one volunteer who had lost her mother saying it felt like "getting the closure I needed so bad." However, the technology raises serious ethical concerns, as commercial "griefbots" become more common despite uncertainty about psychological effects. Several volunteers worried about unhealthy attachments, with one stating, "Maybe I use this technology for months, and I start growing more fond of it." Nora Lindemann, a technology ethicist at Osnabrück University in Germany, warned such interventions can disrupt the grieving process, saying, "The crucial danger is people don't need to adjust to a world without this person."